Mated queen bees and colonies

Over Christmas I was having a tidy up, moving stacks of boxes around, when I noticed something that caught my eye... Inside a stack of stored equipment, I found a dead colony of bees. Whenever you find a dead colony, the first thing you should do is not panic. The second thing you should do is investigate properly. So I decided to do a full dead swarm autopsy and work out exactly what had happened. The Configuration Was a Disaster Before even looking inside, the setup itself told a story....

Most beekeepers see snow and frost and immediately worry that their bees are going to starve or struggle. But in the UK in particular, cold weather is usually not the enemy. In fact, cold weather can be a blessing for your bees and can be one of the best things for a colony because it makes winter predictable, and predictable winter is what stops colonies quietly burning through stores and ending up in trouble. In this blog I am going to explain why cold weather helps, what the real winter...

Wax moth can absolutely ruin a stack of stored brood comb and what makes it worse is that most people only react once they spot the damage, by which point the frames are already on the way out. I want to show you a simple winter trick that costs nothing, uses no chemicals, and works brilliantly if you get a proper hard frost. This is one of those rare moments in beekeeping where nature hands you a free solution. You just have to use it properly. Killing wax moth In a good colony, wax moth is...

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Old brood frames and scrap beeswax can look like a horrible mess, but there is still a lot of value left in them. Once I have rendered out as much wax as I sensibly can, there is often a pile of darker, lower grade wax that I would never use for candles or cosmetics. Instead of throwing it away, I turn it into simple, natural firelighters. In this guide I will walk you through how I make beeswax firelighters using wood wool and recovered wax from old brood frames. This is not about fancy...

Beeswax cappings are one of the nicest by products of extracting honey. They look and smell fantastic, they are usually much cleaner than old brood comb, and they give you some of the highest quality wax you will ever get from your bees. A lot of beekeepers scrape them off, let them pile up in a tub and never quite get around to dealing with them. That is a shame, because with a simple process you can turn those sticky cappings into clean wax blocks ready for candles, polishes or swapping in...

Varroa is still the number one health threat to honey bees in the UK. You feel it in spring when colonies that looked fine in autumn come out weak, slow and virus ridden. One of the biggest improvements I have made in my own beekeeping is learning to time winter oxalic acid treatments around a natural brood break, instead of just picking a random date on the calendar. In this guide I will show you how I use the first proper cold snap as a trigger, apply a simple three week rule and then treat...

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